From The Progressive
By Matthew Rothschild

Who is Bush to lecture the Chinese—or anyone, for that matter—on human rights?

There he was in Thailand, pressing China to uphold human rights when he has done more than any other President to heap scorn on them.

After 9/11, he said, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say. We’re going to kick some ass.”

And Cheney said, it was time to go over to the “dark side.”

And that’s exactly what Bush and Cheney have done.

They’ve illegally kidnapped hundreds of people and disappeared them into black sites.

They’ve had some of these victims tortured with waterboarding and made many others hang by their arms for hours on end.

They’ve held hundreds of people without charge for years in Guantanamo and at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.

And they’ve held thousands of people without charge for years in Iraq, often caging them in brutal containers.

Time and time again, Bush and Cheney and their apologists in the Justice Department have asserted the right to flout international treaties on human rights essentially whenever they feel like it.

They are serial human rights abusers.

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From Wired
By Ryan Singel

Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold opposes border agents searching through Americans’ laptops without cause, and he doesn’t like how Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff articulated the government’s current policy in an interview with Threat Level on Monday.

In that conversation, Chertoff said that in practice, border agents rely on a real suspicion to decide whose laptop to look into or even seize, but that he opposes creating a legal standard for searching Americans’ electronics at the border since it would just lead to too much litigation.

Feingold, an outspoken civil libertarian — the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act — begs to differ.

Secretary Chertoff’s description of the newly published DHS policy on laptop searches was not just misleading – it was flat-out wrong. In an interview with Wired.com, the Secretary stated that “[w]e only do [laptop searches] when we put you into secondary [screening] and we only put you into secondary [screening] … when there is a reason to suspect something.”

But the actual policy that DHS published says the exact opposite. It does not even mention secondary screening, let alone limit laptop searches to those cases, and it expressly states that Americans’ laptops may be searched “absent individualized suspicion.”

Secretary Chertoff’s blatant mischaracterization of the DHS policy contradicts his claim to be engaging in greater “openness and transparency” on this important issue. His statements make it clearer than ever that as we work to protect our national security, Congress must also act to protect law-abiding Americans against highly intrusive searches.

Read more Laptop Searches

From The Boston Globe
By Josh White

At least 17 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to a program that moved them repeatedly from cell to cell to cause sleep deprivation and disorientation as punishment and to soften detainees for subsequent interrogation, according to US military documents.

Defense Department investigations of abuse had previously revealed that the program was used in a limited manner and only on high-value detainees, but the documents indicate that the program was far more widespread and that the technique was still used months after it was banned at the facility in March 2004. Detainees were moved dozens of times in just days and sometimes more than a hundred times over a two-week period.

Military police logs for cell blocks at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, show that guards used the program - dubbed the “frequent flyer” program in official documents - on numerous detainees and noted the program in their 2003 and 2004 records. The logs, reviewed by The Washington Post, also indicate that the frequent cell movements took place on the same days a Navy admiral was visiting Guantanamo to assess possible detainee abuses.

Some detainees violently objected to the moves, spitting at guards and resisting handcuffs and shackles after enduring repeated cell transfers, leading to more sanctions. One cell transfer schedule for detainee 519 - Maher Rafat al-Quwari - shows that he was moved six times a day for 12 days in July 2003, with a four-hour interrogation session in the middle.

Defense officials have previously acknowledged the program’s existence, saying it stopped in 2004. They also have said that detainees are treated humanely and that credible allegations of abuse are investigated.

Read more Interrogation

From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

The U.S. military commission’s split guilty verdict on Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, has drawn praise from the Bush administration and criticism from civil rights groups, but what has been overlooked is the chilling message that “the Hamdan principle” sends about future prosecutions in the “war on terror.”

This new principle holds that anyone – regardless of how tangential a connection to actual acts of terrorism – can be prosecuted through the kangaroo court of the military commissions and be sentenced to a long prison term (or even death). Though Hamdan is a Yemeni, the principle would seem to apply to U.S citizens, too.

In effect, a parallel legal system has been created outside the U.S. Constitution in which the President can order someone locked up indefinitely simply by calling the person an “enemy combatant” and then subjecting the person to what amounts to a “star chamber” proceeding that permits use of secret evidence and coerced testimony.

Though some legal experts insist these special courts don’t apply to U.S. citizens, the language of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and a recent federal court ruling make clear that President George W. Bush’s asserted wartime power to order indefinite detentions covers citizens and non-citizens.

In July, the conservative-dominated U.S. Appeals Court in Richmond, Virginia, opened the door for Bush or a successor to throw American citizens as well as non-citizens into a legal black hole by designating them “enemy combatants,” even if they have engaged in no violent act and are living on U.S. soil.

Read more Hamdan Principle

From The Washington Post
By Dan Eggen

White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers yesterday asked a federal judge to delay an order to cooperate with Congress while they appeal the ruling.

The court filings indicate that Bolten and Miers will continue to resist subpoenas from the House Judiciary Committee as the Bush administration heads into its final months.

The plans for an appeal come in response to a ruling last week by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates. He rejected the administration’s broad claims of executive privilege and ordered Bolten and Miers to comply with congressional subpoenas.

Lawmakers are seeking testimony from Miers and documents from Bolten related to the firings of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. After Bates’s ruling, Democrats announced they would schedule hearings on the issue in September — less than two months before the presidential elections.

Obtaining a delay could head off such hearings until after the elections. The subpoenas also expire at the end of the year.

In their filings yesterday, Bush administration attorneys wrote: “Whatever the proper resolution of the extraordinarily important questions presented, the public interest clearly favors further consideration of issues before defendants are required to take actions that may forever alter the constitutional balance of separation of powers.”

Read more Stalling

From Thomas Paine’s Corner
By Mike Whitney

My friend Tom Feeley is in Big trouble. He runs the web site informationclearinghouse.info which updates “news you won’t find in the corporate media” every day. The site is strongly anti-war.

Tom has gotten his share of death threats over the years, but what happened this week is a lot more serious.

Two days ago, Tom’s wife found three well dressed men in their kitchen. The man who did all the talking, told Tom’s wife (I won’t give her name) that Tom must “Stop what he is doing on the Internet, NOW!” As crazy as it sounds, he pulled back his lapel and showed her a gun of some kind which she could not identify. Like I said, Tom has been threatened before, but nothing like this. Four years ago, he was in a parking lot at Long’s Drug store in Southern California and when he tried to open his door to get out, a man in a car next to him opened his door at precisely the same time which prevented Tom from getting out. Then, a 40-ish year old man got out of the passenger side of the vehicle and approached Tom saying, “You need to stop what you are doing on the web”.

Tom said the man was overweight and had his shirt untucked. Tom was taken aback, but (after collecting himself said) “What the fuck? Who do you think you are telling me what I can do?”

The man answered, “Tom, I’m just giving you some good advice. You should take my advice, Tom.”

This is all I know about the incident. Since, then, there have been occassional death threats, but nothing like what happened on Sunday. Tom’s wife is hysterical and has not returned to the house since the incident. She contacted the FBI but the FBI said there was nothing they could do. Tom and his wife separated recently after a 30 year marriage, so he is publishing from a different location.

Read more Censorship

From Information Clearing House
By Steve Watson

Amazing revelations have emerged concerning already existing government plans to overhaul the way the internet functions in order to apply much greater restrictions and control over the web.

Lawrence Lessig, a respected Law Professor from Stanford University told an audience at this years Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, that “There’s going to be an i-9/11 event” which will act as a catalyst for a radical reworking of the law pertaining to the internet.

Lessig also revealed that he had learned, during a dinner with former government Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, that there is already in existence a cyber equivalent of the Patriot Act, an “i-Patriot Act” if you will, and that the Justice Department is waiting for a cyber terrorism event in order to implement its provisions.

During a group panel segment titled “2018: Life on the Net”, Lessig stated:

There’s going to be an i-9/11 event. Which doesn’t necessarily mean an Al Qaeda attack, it means an event where the instability or the insecurity of the internet becomes manifest during a malicious event which then inspires the government into a response. You’ve got to remember that after 9/11 the government drew up the Patriot Act within 20 days and it was passed.

The Patriot Act is huge and I remember someone asking a Justice Department official how did they write such a large statute so quickly, and of course the answer was that it has been sitting in the drawers of the Justice Department for the last 20 years waiting for the event where they would pull it out.

Of course, the Patriot Act is filled with all sorts of insanity about changing the way civil rights are protected, or not protected in this instance.

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From The Virginian-Pilot
By Daryl Lease

“Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.”

“WHATCHA got there, Mitchell?”

“Another laptop, Wilson. The fellow carrying it was bellyaching about the airline charging seven bucks for a blanket and a pillow. So I nabbed him.”

“Sounds like he’s a potential menace to the homeland. Good work. Finding anything interesting on his computer?”

“Well, I turned up an e-mail cleverly hidden in a folder marked ’spam.’ It’s from the son of a deposed Nigerian prince asking for help wiring $21 million to a U.S. bank account.”

“Aaah, so he’s associating with Nigerians, is he? Interesting, interesting. Remind me: Are the Nigerians for or against us in the war on terror?”

“Against, I think. Or maybe for. To tell you the truth, I have an awful hard time keeping track.”

“Me, too. You’d better copy the e-mail. I don’t like the sound of it. Anything else?”

“A video with Paris Hilton in it.”

“Wonderful! We’ll detain him on obscenity charges.”

Read more Secrets

From AlterNet
By Daphne Eviatar

In January of 2008, Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, 24, was electrocuted while showering in his Baghdad barracks. His death prompted last week’s congressional report concluding that defense contractor KBR, (until a year ago a subsidiary of the oil services giant Halliburton) was well aware that the electrical system in Maseth’s complex was faulty. An accident like this, the report found, was bound to happen. But this report also now raises a larger and thornier question about military defense contractors: can they be held legally liable for their actions — or inactions? Will anyone be held responsible for Maseth’s death?

This is an increasingly important question as the U.S. government hires ever more military contractors to do work that used to be done by U.S. soldiers. The war in Iraq has already involved more outsourcing of military functions than any previous war in American history. An estimated 180,000 civilian contractors now work in Iraq and Afghanistan to support the U.S. government there. They do everything from guard U.S. officials and dignitaries to truck fuel, food and other supplies to military bases — all jobs that used to be done by soldiers.

Private contractors operating in Iraq are not subject to U.S. military authority, or to U.S. or Iraqi law. Their employees are not subject to the rigors of Army basic training; and their superiors are not held to the strict rules and ethics that apply to the U.S. military. As a result, notes Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in his book, “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry,” “When the means of security are privatized, certain mechanisms of moral hazard and adverse selection might lead firms astray. Just as in the rest of commerce, war is business where nice firms do not always finish first.”

Indeed, whistle-blowers at these companies run the risk of being fired. In 2007, shortly after one KBR electrician reported to a defense contracting agency official that logs were being created to make it appear that nonexistent electrical safety systems at the base were working properly, he lost his job, according to The New York Times. Another employee “said his KBR bosses mocked him for raising safety issues.”

Read more Contractors

From uExpress
By Ted Rall

Both major presidential candidates have promised to roll back the Bush Administration’s torture archipelago. Both say they’ll close Guantánamo, abolish legalized torture, and respect the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. Obama also pledges to eliminate “extraordinary rendition,” in which the CIA kidnaps people and flies them to other countries to be tortured, and says he will investigate Bush Administration officials for possible prosecution for war crimes.

If followed by other meaningful changes in behavior–withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq and foreswearing preemptive warfare–restoring the rule of law and respecting the rights of “enemy combatants” can start America’s long, slow climb back to moral parity in the community of nations. But there are worrisome signs that Barack Obama and John McCain’s commitment to moral renewal is less than rock-solid.

McCain, who claimed to have been tortured as a POW in North Vietnam, says a lot of the right things. “We do not torture people,” he said in a 2007 Republican debate. “It’s not about the terrorists; it’s about us. It’s about what kind of country we are.” He used his Vietnam experience against fellow Republicans, bullying Congress into passing a law banning torture against detainees held by the military.

Bush signed McCain’s bill in late 2005, saying it “is to make it clear to the world that this government does not torture and that we adhere to the international convention of torture, whether it be here at home or abroad.”

Read more Torture